eternities:safeaway_lite [Romancing the Toaster]

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======SafeAway Lite ======

====== M4510 Kart ====== 

The tracks have been built several meters above the ground in the Valley of Karl. There are no railings, because what is this, BOWLING FOR CHILDREN?!? At the starting line are you, Lucky and Two Hundred Tanks. 

Lucky is sitting in their tank, with their head poking out the top turret. They turn to you, then slowly pulls their Doggles over their cameras. You see they have decided to use their full power for this race. Excellent. You wouldn’t have it any other way.

The starting lights come up. 

3

Not yet.

2. 

Not yet.

1.

TIME TO REV.

GO!

The MANY TANKS of THE BRASS DUKE instantly stall, while you and Lucky get your turbo-boost and scream ahead, down the track. 

You are neck and neck when suddenly THE BRASS DUKE finally gets a power up: ROCKET PACKS! How unfair! All you’ve had are the bananas dropping from the trees around you! The two of you have to swerve to the edge of the road as two hundred tanks come screaming down the track…

And right off the edge.

“THE BRASS DUKE IS NOT GOOD AT CORNERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRS…”

There are heavy thunks as tanks embed themselves one after another deep in the loamy soil of the cat cove. The Valkyries on hand fly down and begin to retrieve the pile of tanks one at a time. 

It is just you and Lucky now.

Just before the finish line when you have managed to get ahead of Lucky, they use their claw hand to pick up a Mushroom from just off the track and put it into their Tank’s engine! With an explosive combustion they race ahead! 

No! 

There is no way to catch up with them now!

It is impossible!

Unless...?

A small Ankylosaurus comes plodding onto the track in front of you. You grab the creature up, which curls up into its shell with a small yelp.

You take careful aim, and send the smol dinosaur skimming down the track, right for Lucky’s tank tracks.

It is an impossible shot.

You still make it.

Lucky hits the dinosaur's hard shell and their tank spins out of control, flying off the tracks and into the mud!

You’ve done it.

You’ve won.

You drift across the finish line to the rapturous applause of Feeple, cats and Dinosaurs alike. They certainly don’t understand what is going on, but that doesn’t matter to you. 


=====A Safe Space=====

You didn’t know Quake very long before they passed, but in their last few days you were as great a source of comfort as it was possible to be. You both attend the support group regularly, and before you part, Quake expresses their gratitude for knowing you even if only for such a short time. When they are gone, you band together with Vendy Wendy to help everyone process their passing, making them feel safe even when Quake was away. 

=====Footprints=====

In grotto 2C4 on the South-West side of the ravine, we find one of the earliest traces of feeple habitation in the form of what scholars have frequently dubbed ‘primitive cave paintings’. This find, however, is anything but primitive. Famously, the footprints marked on the west wall make for a striking greeting on first entering the cave. It is thought that every foople in the community dipped their foot into the toxic waste running through the ravine on reaching maturity in order to add their print to the wall, demonstrating their individual contribution to, as well as their place within the wider feeple society. As I will go on to explore in greater detail in my chapter Best Foot Forwards: One Small Step for a Foot, One Giant Leap for Fooplekind, this self-identification as a part of a whole is crucial to the development of feeple as an independently cognizant species. 

On the Northern Wall, we are given an insight into the earliest days of feeple history, perhaps even evidence for the beginnings of foople mythology itself, which, while not widely accepted among scholars as a phenomenon occurrent in foople culture, I postulate to have originated ca. AK 0. Unlike the cave paintings I discuss in my book A Foople Fantasy: The Foot, The Myth, The Legend, these particular paintings do not appear to depict a creation myth as such, although they certainly make reference to mytho-historical events dating back to the time around which the mythos was founded. The story played out on this wall is one of progress and invention: a new technical age ushered in by what one can only surmise to be the advent of botkind in the foople ravine, which correlates with the dating of these cave paintings to AK 0. 

Depicted here are several bots, of which only three figures remain consistently recognisable. The first is easily identified as Xetarg the Grate, accompanied by their usual crustacean iconography, but the other two have gone woefully undiscussed throughout most of the feeple scholia. Figure 1 depicts some variety of cuboid robot - while in other cultures, a cube may be drawn to signify the less easily carved circle, the early foople habit of representing their own kind through circles rules out this reasoning. The crosshatching surrounding the cube, whilst speculated by some to be a merely ornamental detail, might signify a similarly textured substance such as the grills found on a car or the tracks on a tank. The other figure appears to be of a race car, although various inscrutable details suggest modifications of some sort to the model contrary to its original design. 

// - Extract from The Deeper Feeple Fascination: A Podiatric History, published in AK 3547//
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